So, that's a sign of a strong future career rather than a quick return to the milk round. (I always assume anyone who does well on the X Factor used to be a milkman.) Right?

Maybe not... only three other X Factor finalists have broken the million mark with their prize-winning single. Alex Burke - whose career has more or less judder to a halt; Matt Cardle and Shayne Ward.

If I were James Arthur... well, I'd have gone on Pointless instead of the X Factor in the first place, but if I leaped into James Arthur, Sam Beckett style, right now, I'd be keeping my options open down the dairy.

When I first read that the Independent is closing, I thought "well, Lebedev isn't made of money." Then I thought "hang on, he probably literally is."

It turns out the news was about The Independent in Sunderland, which has been the city's home of interesting and vibrant music for nearly six years. It shuts tonight, ironically felled by the collapse of the Kwik Save supermarket chain - as part of the demolition work to build homes on the site of the old kwikie, the club is coming down too.

But it's not the end of the story - a new Independent is going to open, across the road, in a matter of weeks.

Amy Winehouse is also in the running for a prize - best female solo artist. Yes, you don't need to go and check on Wikipedia; she'd died before the qualifying period for the 2013 awards. And although she had a couple of posthumous albums released in the qualifying year, neither was considered good enough to make the album shortlist. This has the feel of the way Annie Lennox always seemed to be automatically nominated regardless of if she'd done anything much, but with a ghoulish tint to it.

Ironically, Adele, who has been working through the period, and released a record considered good enough to be nominated, isn't considered good enough to go on the shortlist.

The worst thing about New Year is that each change of calendar means that, somewhere, a shady group is getting ready to put on a Brit Awards show. Gordon's excited, though:

IN only six weeks the The Brit Awards 2013 will burst on to your TV – and they are shaping up to be one of the best on record.

Really? One of the best on record, you say?

MUSE, ROBBIE WILLIAMS, MUMFORD & SONS and ONE DIRECTION have all signed up to perform live with more acts to be announced.

JAMES CORDEN is back on board as host, so the winning formula is almost complete. THE ROLLING STONES could just be that extra-special ingredient — and are preparing the Deep Heat after a Best Live nomination.

Those two paragraphs appear to be completely at odds with the first one, surely?

Thursday, January 10, 2013

HMV spokesman Gennaro Castaldo told Sky News the Blue Cross Sale was not unusual for this time of year.

"Normally we'd look to run a multi-buy campaign of some kind at this time of year, but we thought we'd freshen our promotional mix up a bit and try something a bit different that will hopefully stand out from all the other sale offers on the high street right now," he said.

It certainly does stand out. It's the sort of thing we haven't seen since Borders started making massive cuts.

Abbott joined Grade as they were touring in support of their last proper album, at the same time as Somehow Hollow's Brad Casarin was helping the band out. Casarin took Kent back with him to his main band, but a crisis at Grade led to them returning to the fold for the last year of that band's (original) run. Once Grade finally wound up, Somehow Hollow was brought out of the deep-freeze and reactivated.

Somehow Hollow split in 2004.

Kent Abbott died on January 7th; he was 31. Donations in his memory - suggested for Canadian Mental Health - are being handled by the funeral home.

Okay, it was in a category for just Competition TV Shows, and the same sophisticated electorate gave the Fantasy TV Show award to Supernatural ("It's Supernatural That A Programme Which Should Have Been Cancelled Two Seasons Back Is Still On The Air" to give it its full title.) But a win is a win, right?

Even more unusually, Maroon 5 have taken the band category. Maroon 5. I checked, these aren't the results from about ten years ago. Especially since the runners-up were No Doubt, Green Day, Linkin Park and Train.

The one genuine surprise in the list is that One Direction's Whatever Makes You Beautiful crushed both Call Me Maybe and We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together in the Song prize.

In a statement Play.com said: "Moving forward we are intending to focus exclusively on our successful marketplace, which is our main business area, and to phase out the direct-retail part of our business."

It's going to cost 147 people in Jersey and 67 in the UK their jobs. It's unclear if it'll mean any extra cash flowing to the Exchequer. The guess would be not.

It lies in the concept of consumption capital (pdf), described by Gary Becker and George Stigler.

When we bought and listened to Bowie records in the 70s and 80s we accumulated a stock of consumption capital. And the utility we derive from this is so great that a new addition to it naturally has low marginal utility.

In other words, what we think of as consumption is, in many cases, a form of saving - something that gives us utility in future years.Just as saving builds financial capital which we can draw on in future, so spending builds up a stock of satisfaction which we can draw upon in the future.

Does anyone really think the money they spent on Hunky Dory would have been better invested in the stock market? (If you do, leave now; you're not the sort of reader I want.)

IT can only be a matter of time before ID star HARRY STYLES’ tattoo collection contains Latin.

And after hearing about the band’s clever contract, I think I’ve got the perfect phrase for him: “Omnes pro uno, unus pro omnibus”.

Alexandre Dumas’ coined the motto “All for one, one for all” in his novel The Three Musketeers.

Gordon, calm down - this is getting a wee bit highbrow for the column that is usually tracking who is having sex with whom. People might think you're some sort of intellectual. Wind it back it, man.

I know it well from the cartoon Dogtanian And The Muskehounds on TV when I was a nipper.

That's more like it.

Gordon rushed to the library after being inspired by One Direction's new contract:

It is the perfect summary for the legally binding document that Harry, LOUIS, LIAM, NIALL and ZAYN have signed — which basically means that if one jacks it in, all five suffer the same brutal financial punishment.
[...]
[A source said] “If one of them walks away before then, then all five miss out on the money.

“They don’t miss out on a few quid either, we are talking millions.

“They all get on really well, but it would be the kind of deal that would see them through the worst aggro possible.”

Hmm. Isn't the problem with this supposedly genius bit of legal paperwork that, if someone gets so pissed off with being an origami song-and-dance act that they're prepared to walk away from a multi-million deal, they'd probably have reached the point where they'd see being able to quit and cause enormous pain to their former colleagues as a bit of a bonus.

Tuesday, January 08, 2013

Absolutely astonishing piece of work to get it released with hardly anybody knowing it was going to happen; and extraordinary for almost the entire world* to listen to a song for the first time, more-or-less simultaneously, and more-or-less without coming to it with a set of recommendations or disrecommendations ringing in their ears.

* - I'm using "the entire world" in the sense of "people who care about Western musicians of a certain age who were up at that time in the morning", of course.

It's possible to both admire the way the song has been put together - craftsmanlike, as you'd expect - and not really warm to it. But you don't care what I think, so let's take a quick look at some of the instant reaction.

Performances are reportedly often three-quarters full for the show based on songs by Posh Spice Victoria Beckham’s pals.

Even before you get to that tortuous "Posh Spice Victoria Beckham's pals" that sentence is twisting like a mountain snake after a groundhog. "Often three quarters full" sounds bad, but really feels like an attempt to throw the worst possible light on the size of the houses.

"Often", so not always, or regularly, but just sometimes; and the rest of the time, presumably, the theatre must be more than three-quarters full or else it would have been those figures which would have formed the heart of the claim.

Monday, January 07, 2013

The former lawyers for George Clinton, Hendricks & Lewis, have taken their former client to court over unpaid bills. And, as result, the lawyers have been handed the copyrights on a range of Funkadelic songs.

Apparently, Clinton had run up a debt of USD1.5million - so, presumably, had only had two ten-minute meetings with Hendricks & Lewis.

So, that's a bunch of funk classics now in the hands of a legal firm (at least until they've earned enough to pay off the debt). I think the court should at least mandated that the Hendricks & Lewis can only keep the copyright if they do a cover version. It's what would have happened in Boston Legal.

Sunday, January 06, 2013

A spat between Azealia Banks and Perez Hilton normally need not detain us, but given that it has now managed to generate one of the weakest defences of bad behaviour since "it was different in the 1970s", let's bring ourselves up to speed.

It all started when Banks recorded a song "dissing" Angel Haze. Perez Hilton - who apparently is still going - upbraided Banks for doing this.

Banks then reacted by going onto Twitter:

‘Omg u should just kill yourself… Like for real… lol what a messy faggot you are.’

Even before you get to the homophobic bit, she's gone too far with telling Perez to kill himself. Seriously, who types that into a Twitter box and doesn't then realise they've gone too far?

But rather than review the idea that she was telling someone to "really" kill themselves, Banks was gearing up to call Hilton a faggot.

The backblow was predictable. But Banks wasn't going to back down. No, it turns out that Banks wasn't being homophobic at all:

‘A faggot is not a homosexual male,’ she said. ‘A faggot is any male who acts like a female. There’s a BIG difference.’

Let's just accept the first half for a moment and poke the idea that "a male who acts like a female" is a bad thing. Or a thing at all. What does that mean? Is it about having lactating nipples or pissing sitting down? What on earth was that supposed to be as a justification?

But let's not worry too much about that second half, because it comes after the first half.

A faggot is not a homosexual male.

Not quite, Azealia. It's not a thing you should call a homosexual male, but it definitely is a slur against them. True, it was originally thrown at old women in the 16th Century, but for the last hundred years it's pretty much been an exclusive insult for gay men.

Azealia hadn't quite finished, though. She went off and had another little think.

‘Really not as moved by this f word thing as u all want me to be. As a bisexual person I knew what I meant when I used that word.

‘And I meant what I meant when I used that word.’

No, Banks. Being bisexual doesn't mean you can slag off gay men with impunity. It just makes it worse when you do.

Still, I suppose we should extend a grudging respect for this inventive updating of 'how can I hate women, my Mum was one' for 2013.

I've just spoken to Vini and told him how much has been donated by fans and music lovers worldwide – he's ecstatic.

He's said that enough has now been donated to ensure that he can pay off all of the backlog of rent that he owed, and he's asked me to pass on his huge gratitude to you all and let you know that no further donations are needed.

He's explained that going forward he should be able to afford to pay his rent, but the debt relates to the period after he had his three strokes but before he was assessed for disability allowance.

Who knew - besides the French - that there was still a chain of Virgin Megastores in France?

Not for much longer, though, as the Parisian flagship branch is closing and management are struggling to come up with a plan to keep the other branches going - although it admits this will involve closures and downsizing, even if they can pull it off.

Although it's lovely to put the blame on a private equity group (Butler own all but 20% of the company; the other 20% is held by Lagardère, who bought the shops from Branson's Virgin back in 2007), it's selling records in a shop. It's increasingly hard to see how that can work as a mass-market proposition.